


scenes from a nasa rover

by lalalyds2



Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F, Sibling Incest, Spellcest, and Howard Barker's Scenes from an Execution, and also Ariana Grande's NASA, and the Mars Rover, and this author getting tipsy for art's sake, look out babes - i'm back on my nonsense, of this:, opportunity, sisters being soft, the sweet funky lil robot, this is an experiment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-16
Updated: 2019-02-16
Packaged: 2019-10-29 18:49:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17813507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalalyds2/pseuds/lalalyds2
Summary: "Baby, you know time apart is beneficialIt’s like I'm the universe and you'll be N-A-S-A"ORthis is not a songfic, but i can't write summaries to save any story





	scenes from a nasa rover

**Author's Note:**

> if you haven't read my tags, there's nothing i can say   
> even my tags can't excuse this level of basic bitch

What do sisterly empires look like?

Zelda knows hers.

It is brocade and mauve, mascara wands and half used lipstick tubes.

It is an upturned nose, a saunter that causes hair bounce, an abundance of laughter that never quite reaches happiness.

It is a glass case of everything dreamed of.

Never touched or taken out.

Real would smudge the perfect.

Only longing sustains it.

She wonders of Hilda’s.

Never stepped a foot in sister’s domain.

She claims because it would be ugly.

Not honesty.

It would be Hilda’s truth.

She cannot picture that truly.

Does not want to.

But she imagines.

Blood on daisies.

Overstuffed bookshelf weeping from unrealistic fantasy and patriarchal orgasm.

When her humor goes gallows, she imagines a dartboard with her picture knifed to it.

Hilda would be so tacky, if allowed.

She knows Hilda’s Zelda-nickname.

_Insufferable bitch_.

She insuffers with pride.

And a little pinching.

When she is being morose, or drunk, she knows Hilda’s sanctuary would be more quilting, pillows to melt to, doilies more available than dandelions.

Bright and sun.

Withstanding distaste, spreading on wind, sowing butter yellow in all the world’s crevices.

It would be comforting.

Lovely.

Hilda’s truth.

Somehow, repugnant.

She hasn’t been asked to see that empire room.

Hilda’s seen hers.

But it’s her turn to withhold.

Little fish, Hilda’s gills stay closed.

Zelda wonders if she ever breathes.

She would notice, would see how breasts rise and peak like waves, receding to the white-capped breaches of Hilda’s existence.

She would like to see that gaping red again.

It’s been so long since she’s seen Hilda’s internal.

Hilda, across the hall.

Hilda, across a gaping chasm.

Their empires stay gated and locked, high walls go higher till there’s nothing but tight-lipped nodding and thumb twiddling.

Sisters Spellman living separate.

Zelda Spellman, living purgatory.

This distance is surely just limbo.

Or short living hell.

She’s not sure when Hilda’s snores transposed into a past heaven.

She’s not sure when she became so obsessed with Hilda’s everything.

She’s not sure when their universe went so void.

The vacuum is empty and far colder than expected.

 

~*~

 

Bed swamp.

There is a fish swimming in her pond brain.

Every time the water ripples pacify, the fish resurfaces.

Air bubbles go gummy.

Red gills gape.

Distress. Distraction.

Hilda is having an emotion.

It’s driving Zelda to despair.

She never snubs witching hours, but this ridiculous.

4:52 is simply too early, or too late.

The fish is bubbling stars now.

Either night causes mares, or Hilda is falling up into space.

Either way, Zelda wishes she’d be a little quieter about whatever terror currently plaguing her iridescent scales.

She cannot sleep under such duress.

Astral checkup tempts strong.

But Zelda won’t spy.

Not tonight.

She sends out soothing, summons a hook and skewering line.

Hilda is far better at empath ability, but Zelda is no incompetent.

Mental hands pet slime and sharpness.

Physical hands wipe tears from Zelda’s own cheeks.

Hilda’s fish so despondent.

Zelda sniffles, chides herself at being so affected.

Regardless, the fish settles.

No more rippling.

The pond mirrors clear.

She slumbers.

 

~*~

 

Breakfast is silence and toast.

Infuriatingly meek, she sucks the blackened bread, tries to quiet the crunch.

Hilda has sighed seven times.

Sabrina and Ambrose know better than to pry.

Or perhaps they also are sucking toast.

They leave, the house goes death.

Not just because they’ve got a new cadaver.

Hilda no humming, no wooden beads clacking, no shuffling steps hovering on the edge of Zelda’s peripheral.

Hilda just works, eyes hiding something a little like hopelessness.

Zelda wishes a murder.

At least that would get a reaction.

As it stands, she could go wraith and there’d be no start.

Hilda so incongruent to her normal warmness, her willful bat wit, her luminance.

She traipses listless, and Zelda cannot scrutinize the cause.

Hilda still has a shift at her insipid cafe later, had gushed about Cee’s weather expertise just a day or two ago.

So what is this invented grievance?

 

~*~

 

Hilda is crying.

Reading the newspaper.

And crying.

Actually so.

Tears ripple pond brain as much as dream fish.

Zelda will not be subtle this time.

Hook and fishing line before. Now, Hilda’s in the barrel (or parlor, but who’s counting semantics?), and Zelda’s got a metaphorical gun.

And a literal one.

She’s going to shoot out the answer to Hilda’s melancholy, one way or another.

She is not a sympathetic creature.

But she will winkle out Hilda’s truth, and maybe finally they will breathe without watering lungs.

 

~*~

 

She imagines the nose of the gun feels like all hard, colding metal.

Hilda certainly stiffens, stifles her watering eyes.

They rim red and swimmy, but the drowning is slowing.

They both breathe deep and taste salt.

“Spill your woes now, sister mine, or spill your brains. I will not stand your somber cloud anymore.”

Hilda blubbers further then, surprising Zelda into lowering her emotion-shielding weapon.

Hilda thrusts Zelda’s newspaper (the one she has _not_ been able to read yet, considering how Hilda has hoarded and rained down on it) in Zelda’s face.

“Look,” Hilda gullups, chest heaving so desolate and sincerely upset.

The headline shouts incomprehensible to Zelda’s eyes.

A little machine sits on a barren wasteland, the black and white page bleeding like some kind of lost war.

“Oppy died.”

 

~*~

 

" _My battery is low and it's getting dark_."

The words hit hollow in her chest.

She bleeds and does not know why.

Opportunity gone.

So few words.

So much loss.

 

~*~

 

Opportunity and empires.

She uses this, crosses a threshold.

There is a fish swimming in her brain, in her belly.

Zelda knocks on Hilda’s door.

Tentatively.

The door opens.

Also tentatively.

Eyes dry but showing so older than they have any right to.

Hilda almost looks her age.

Her empire is much quieter than Zelda expected.

There are dandelion doilies, and there are quilts, but Hilda’s room looks as it used to when connected to Zelda’s.

It sticks oddly proud and agave in her chest, when she realizes.

Hilda is not stifled, even with Zelda.

She’s been standing here too long, said too little.

Really, she’s said nothing at all.

And yet, all she does is hold out a checkered blanket.

Hilda takes it wordlessly.

Zelda thrums peculiar at this act of obedience.

She wraps her own blanket snuggly around her shoulders with one hand, entangles Hilda’s fingers with her other.

As though be-spelled, as though afraid of something startling this into ending early, they move swift and quiet through the house.

Hilda does not comment when they exit through the back door.

She does not complain as they walk on damp grass, their bedroom slippers going squish and stained on moistured green.

There are no questions as they climb the hill, though they do not hide their labored breath.

Instinct and impression beg Zelda to hold in struggle, but she stands strong in her limitations.

She promised herself this — tonight, she is going to be generous.

Includes showing faults.

She has so envied Hilda’s affability in the past, her easy acceptance of her own imperfections.

Zelda’s strive has always felt inferior to Hilda’s perspicacity.

Instead of serving her, Zelda has humiliated.

She cannot do so tonight.

Tonight shimmers something fragile.

She will not shatter it.

She would cut on the shards.

She would slice.

She would not be salvaged.

 

~*~

 

When they reach the top, collapse on the shivering night, the damp blades of grass bend under their blanketed backs.

Their shoulders so close they brush together with every breath.

Their heads so close their curly golds weave around like lovers’ vines.

Exhaled air hovers cloudy, dragon whisper above them.

The heaven vaults open.

Zelda counts the multitude of virtues splayed out in black sky like they are to be owned by her.

They twinkle in marvelous actuality.

She wonders how Marlowe could have survived not believing in the heavens.

Surely, he’d seen these stars.

These transcendent bodies could not be anything else but paradisiacal reward.

Perhaps Marlowe knew as she does:

This place of afterlife is not promised to her.

Better to deny its existence than to know it’s been denied to her.

She is fiercely struck with the need to pray.

If Lucifer ever wins this celestial battle, she hopes beyond hoping she gets a star to keep.

A star all for her.

It’s the closest piece to heaven she’ll ever own.

 

~*~

 

When Hilda sighs, she realizes how selfish the night has gone.

This was not to be about her.

Hilda’s arm wriggles from her blanket cocoon, reaches out to the vast expanse.

Points for Zelda’s benefit.

“There. That’s Mars.”

She follows the extended finger.

Scintillating little spot, tiny in its distance, large in its content.

She sighs too.

“Hello, Mars.”

Hilda’s giggle innocent and young.

Zelda feels very much like they are still summer’s children, spitting out cherry seeds to the welcome earth.

Spinning fae, unaware time had already been scheming against them.

The safety of nostalgia swells in them both, bolsters Zelda’s emotional fragility.

She asks something she’s been wanting to since the paper was shoved in her face.

“Why does Opportunity’s absence bother so much?”

A pause.

As pregnant as the night sky.

“You’ve just answered it.”

“Simply that it’s gone?”

“Exactly so.”

She can understand that.

If Hilda is Opportunity, she knows the absence intimately.

Hilda says the space is beneficial for them both, that she’s discovering self.

She only feels the loss of Hilda orbit, tracks only to gravity.

It pulls heavy.

Distance dangerous.

There is something so exquisitely calamitous to feel someone’s affection wane.

She’s going gloom.

Needs something else to grasp.

“I didn’t know you were interested in astronomy.”

Hilda’s laugh lilts, coats Zelda’s being with chamomile.

“I mostly like the stories behind them. Myth and mystique. And marbling on my own ideas.”

“Oh?” Zelda peers at her sister through sleep-dusted lashes. “Such as?”

Hilda opens her mouth, and saga spills out.

Andromeda, chained and waiting, sacrifice for her mother’s beauty.

Cassiopeia, lost a daughter for beauty, shamed and called proud.

Orion, killed for a sibling’s jealousy because when he hunted he caught affection.

Gemini.

She stumbles original on that one.

Zelda cannot be so noble as to ignore the trip.

“You disagree on this myth?”

Curiosity betrays her.

Hilda’s arm pressing closer.

“I would have preferred if they were sisters.”

Cherry on the tongue.

She glimmers, pretends it’s not a blush.

“It’s silly, I know, but—"

“No.”

Zelda keeps her eyes open, stares at the ethereal lights undulating before her, threatening to crush down or fling her up and out.

Constellations connect.

She stays anchored, Hilda’s shoulder a focal point.

The peace feels a sin.

She pauses.

No repercussion, the cosmos is comfortingly indifferent to their night.

“Keep going. Tell me your Gemini.”

Hilda waxes, bright and allegorical.

They travel to morning on words and sleep-silly and suspension of time.

 

~*~

 

The walk home is hush, Hilda’s voice gone, Zelda too reverent for speech.

The grass warms golden-graced under the yawning sun.

Even the birds lay in wait. Their chirping could not compete with memories of star symphony silence.

Life suspends when quiet.

It’s not till they’re awaiting tea in the kitchen that Zelda breaks this otherworld they’ve invented in the course of one night.

She’d only meant to fix Hilda’s curl, the dastardly lock tucked between roseate lips.

Hilda had clutched her wrist, surged forward.

Hesitated.

Cloud soft lips still hovering now.

Decides, lands on the upper bite of Zelda’s mouth.

Disappears all too soon.

It is a surprise, but not.

The universe blinks.

Multiplies in galaxies.

Like Andromeda, Zelda waits.

Perhaps to be saved.

Perhaps to be kissed again.

Does not know who is saving her, or the monster she’s to be saved from.

Like Cassiopeia, she feels resplendent. Suddenly vain.

Fierce, hunted, hunting.

Hilda catches her lips once more.

Gemini sisters, not so sisterly.

But still Gemini.

Like curious Mars, she roves Hilda’s lips.

Fingers traveling the curving planes of her face, the shadow lands under her nose, the dips and craters of her forehead.

She finds perfect places.

When they breach for oxygen, Hilda looks at her like she looks at the Milky Way.

Awe and wonder.

Curious desire.

Longing to join.

“Hi.”

Of all things, Hilda says hello.

Zelda can only laugh.

It is happy.

Somewhere, an old empire falls.

“We should go gazing again soon.”

“Yes.”

Zelda’s response too immediate.

She cannot bring herself to mind.

“And explore other bits of divinity.”

“Yes.”

Hilda, a beaming hope.

Hilda, a star space.

Hilda, hers.

It seems she’s got a piece of heaven already.

 

~*~

 

When Zelda prays that night, she offers grace for blessed Opportunity.

When she thinks of the little robot, so far removed from her, so soft in its goodbye, she sees Hilda.

She sees moon.

She sees Mars.

She will be reaching for them all.

She will catch them, one by one.

She will tell them hello.

They have new empires to build.

**Author's Note:**

> this is a shameful mixing of pop culture, scientific tragedy, myth and contemporary theatre, and hints at my own original music while i pretend i'm clever  
> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯


End file.
